New Ways To Send Christmas Cards.

Sending Christmas cards to friends and relations is a tradition that began in the middle of the nineteenth century. This was a period when Charles Dickens helped to promote the sentimentality around the Christian family. People liked to believe that they belonged to morally upright happy families. The custom of sending cards to equally moral and upright families helped to promote and sustain the notion of a Christian centred happy family society.

Throughout the twentieth century the tradition prevailed. Around late November the first messages would arrive and continue to increase rapidly in volume Christmas day after which a few belated greetings would drift in guiltily as the New Year began. It was a pleasant tradition founded on goodwill even if it was distorted to some extent by commercialism and sentimentality.

It was common for people to use the annual crop of cards to augment Christmas decorations. They were strung on strings across the windows of a living room so that guests, left alone for a few moments could browse through what one friend was saying to another. Some people took pride in showing off how many cards they had received.

The Christmas card tradition was quite often the only link between distant relatives living on separate continents. Christmas letters slipped inside a home made card would give a detailed account of the activities of relatives that one had never met. It was a pleasurable duty for people to take out the list of recipients and write twitter type comments reminding friends that they were in the sender's thought, if only once a year.

There can be no doubt that sentimentality played its part in the tradition. By definition, sentimentality means the self indulgent expression of false or shallow emotion. As pigs that see a mud wallow cannot resist plunging in, so the British public cannot resist the urgent need to wallow when a royal wedding comes about. The tradition of card sending afforded many people of annual wallowing which compensated for the delays between royal weddings.

Although Christmas is supposedly a festival celebrating the birth of Christ many commercial interests take advantage of the occasion. Though Xmas lights may have been turned off in London in case they might offend, they shine brightly in supermarkets in Islamic countries, with carols playing in the background. Stationery manufacturers and organized charities made huge profits out of the tradition.

Sentimentality and commercialism do tend to tarnish the birthday celebrations for Jesus but some things in the Bible suggest that Jesus might have overlooked many of the less worthy aspects and gone with the flow of joyousness. He turned water into wine when the festive occasion demanded, and was generous about the extravagance of anointing his feet with oil. Many small indications are that he had the sense of humour that comes with the human condition and would have entered into celebrations.

Towards the end of the twentieth century the boom began to fade as the internet and social networking sites seemed set to alter the ways in which human beings interact with each other. Post boxes are becoming less and less important in the lives of individuals as emails replace letters and envelopes. For some people the flow of ordinary mail has dwindled to a few greeting from insurance companies and real estate agents.

But the tradition will not die easily because there is much that is good in it. Greetings may now be sent online in hundreds of inventive ways. Animated and attractive cards may be sent to the email inbox of friends instead of the rickety wooden box at the end of the garden path.